Every aspiring electrical engineer quickly figures out that a fast and easy way to get boards and wires connected is to use header. We like to keep a couple different kinds of sticks of header around but the first one you’ll want to get plenty of is the male 0.1″ ‘breakaway’ type. You can easily break off pieces to fit whatever you’re working on. We suggest having at least 10 sticks of single row, 36 or 40 pin header around.
That’s it for this week, be sure to bookmark and use the part finder!
Sometimes disobedience is necessary and good when rules fail us, and it’s at the core of why we hack. Hacking is a means of expressing dissatisfaction, confounding the mechanism, and ultimately doing better. Here’s why it’s so important.
Across Eastern Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan and the Gobi Desert— it certainly was a long way to go without getting lost. Four driverless electric vans successfully ended an 8,000-mile test drive from Italy to China — a modern-day version of Marco Polo’s journey around the world — with their arrival at the Shanghai Expo on Thursday.
Every part can rotate around in any way with thunbscrews and wingnuts.
Two sturdy alligator clips for holding PCBs, wires, parts
2.5″ diameter 4x magnifying glass good for checking out your soldering technique
Weighted base keeps everything steady
Even though there are fancier ones with soldering-iron holders, we found those would constantly tip over when a soldering iron was in place so we suggest getting one of these and a separate soldering iron holder/stand.
UPDATED PRODUCT! Medium 6V 2W Solar panel 2.0 Watt. These panels come to us from Voltaic Systems, makers of fine solar-powered bags and packs. These are waterproof, scratch resistant, and UV resistant. They use a high efficiency monocrystalline cell. They output 6V at 330 mA via 3.5mm x 1.3mm DC jack connector. The substrate is an aluminum / plastic composite, specifically designed to be strong and lightweight. They can easily stand up to typical outdoor use including being dropped and leaned on. They’re very high quality and suggested for projects that will be exposed to the outdoors.
New! These now comes with 4 plastic mounting screws which makes it easy to attach the panel, even to fabric!
Shown here a patent for a magnetic wire recorder by Elias E. Ries. There are quite a few patents for devices like this, but I just dig the way this one looks. I love the drawings in old-timey patents, and they way they can convey motion and depth with nothing but linework. The other reason I love these things: they represent our heritage of invention and innovation in America.
NEW PRODUCT – Basic GPS module – PMB-648. We picked up a few of these lower-cost GPS modules specifically for those that want to use them for time-keeping purposes. They function perfectly fine as a GPS, but they are not as accurate or low-power as the EM-406 modules we carry for location applications. For that reason, we don’t suggest them for precise, battery-powered location logging.
The PMB-648 GPS features 20 parallel satellite-tracking channels for fast acquisition of NMEA0183 v2.2 data for robotics navigation, telemetry, or experimentation. There is a built-in patch antenna; rechargeable battery for memory and RTC backup; cable for power, TTL and RS-232 connections.
SiRFstarIII chipset
20 parallel satellite-tracking channels for fast acquisition and reacquisition
Built-in rechargeable battery for memory and RTC backup
Supports NMEA0183 V2.2 data protocol
Includes cable for power, TTL and RS-232 connections
Power requirements: 3.3V – 5V DC @ 65mA
Communications: TTL or RS-232 asynchronous serial @ 4800 bps
The hardware design process is fraught with pitfalls, from library component sketchiness, parts availability, erroneous data sheets, underestimates of complexity and long lead times. Designing good hardware on time, on budget and to specifications is like being in a knife fight. Hardware will cut you. I will present my methods for managing blood loss in the hardware design and production arena.
I’m stepping up my open source hacking exploits on the Liquidware Antipasto blog into a whole new realm of activity, and I’m looking for a fellow hacker and developer who has experience programming Android GUI’s. Obviously everything and anything coded for a Liquidware or Antipasto project will get open sourced, and there are a number of applications and ideas for projects I have that I’d love to work on.
A number of companies are asking for Liquidware’s help developing handheld apps, and I’d like to code them in Android. The work is part time for now, and probably perfect for a college, graduate, recent graduate, or programmer looking for extra work on the side.
Hi all, I’ve now connected a DCF77 receiver to pin PC1 of my monochron and it works fine! I made a fork of the MultiChron project on github to add the DCF support to the firmware. The sources can be found under (git hub). The hardware modifications are described in a howto document (PDF).
… my cats, Mungo Jerre and Rumple Teaser, are big fans of MOSFET. Also, wanted to mention that the videos with Limor have been great inspiration for my daughter (age 10) and her Girl Scout troop. Appreciate having the handy role model to show the girls that electronics is cool. I’m also glad that kits seem to be making a comeback. I grew up on Heathkits and ham radio but that path into technology seemed to fade away for quite a few years. AdaFruit is a huge new resource I really appreciate. All the Best, Bob…
As explained in the introduction, a power supply is a buffer circuit that is placed between an incompatible source and load in order to make them compatible. In this section we explore some simple dissipative circuits that can be placed between a 12 Vdc battery and a 5 Vdc load to make them compatible. The buffer circuits are simple in that we will restrict the parts to one each or less of the following parts: variable resistor, breakdown diode, switch, diode, single winding inductor, and capacitor.
For the dissipative topologies we will only use the variable resistor and the breakdown diode. The other parts will be used in the next section on switching topologies.
We will be concerned only with the power conversion part of the circuit, not the control. We will assume that the circuits are open loop and the output voltage is controlled manually by the value of a variable resistor or the duty cycle of a switch.
Although simple from a parts basis, the circuits we will explore with these parts are not necessarily simple from an analytical viewpoint. Some of the switching topologies will contain right-half-plane zeroes, an interesting topic that will be discussed later in this tutorial.
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